Saturday, 26 March 2016

Aftermath to police raid in Brussels

Latest:
Police now say the raid in Brussels is related to the arrest that
took place in Paris overnight. So much for the whole "no
tangible evidence" line (see below).

POLICE
OPERATION IN BRUSSELS LINKED TO FOILED ATTACK PLOT IN FRANCE

Update:
Police in Brussels are conducting raids in Shaerbeek, the site of the
home searched in the wake of Tuesday's attacks. One person has
reportedly been "neutralized" while witnesses have heard at
least two explosions.

*
* *

European
authorities are scrambling to avert further terrorist attacks across
the bloc in the wake of Tuesday’s bombings in Brussels that killed
nearly three dozen people and wounded hundreds more.

14
months after the January 2015 raid in Verviers that left two men with
links to Paris mastermind Abdelhamid Abaaoud dead, Belgian
authorities are apparently still no closer to dismantling the ISIS
cell responsible for the attacks in France and the bombings that
unfolded in the Brussels airport and metro earlier this week.

Paris
fugitive Salah Abdeslam was captured last Friday, but at least two
other suspects escaped a March 14 raid on a residence in Forest that
was rented by one of the Bakraoui brothers. Revelations that the
Bakraouis may have been involved in collecting the surveillance
footage of a Belgian nuclear official found in a November 30 raid on
an Auvelais home rented to Mohamed Bakkali (who may have sheltered
Abaaoud and others) as well as the realization that a man seen with
Abdeslam in September and previously known as “Soufiane Kayal,”
was actually bomb maker Najim Laachraoui suggest
authorities in Europe were either horrible at “connect the dots”
as kids, simply didn’t take the threat of further attacks by the
team seriously, or were willfully ignorant.

(Ibrahim
el-Bakraouis ca. 2015)

Indeed, Khalid
El Bakraoui was also the subject of an Interpol red notice as
was Laachraoui. Ibrahim El Bakraoui was deported from
Turkey, where President Erdogan swears he notified Belgian
authorities of the danger. There are conflicting reports as to how
Belgium and the Netherlands handled the information.

On
Thursday and Friday, in an apparent effort to make up for lost time
(and lost life), Belgian and French authorities conducted anti-terror
raids that netted six arrests in Belgium and one in Paris.

Information
on the Belgian arrests is sparse, but we do know that three
people in a car were arrested outside the prosecutor's office,
another two were rounded up in Jette, and one person was detained in
a different part of the Belgian capital. Further details weren’t
available but one has to wonder if perhaps someone is trying to get
to Abdeslam who suddenly wants to be extradited to France “as soon
as possible,” so he can “explain himself.”

(police
sketch of second metro suspect)

Abdeslam
claims he had no knowledge of Tuesday’s attack and did not know
Laachraoui even though, as noted above, the two were seen together
last year. “The apparent lack of urgency in questioning him
heightened concern over Belgium’s handing of the terror
threat,” The
Telegraph writes adding
that “Abdeslam denied knowing Najim Laachraoui, “despite [the
fact that] Abdeslam is known to have accompanied him from Hungary to
Belgium in September as Laachraoui travelled back from Syria under an
alias, ‘Soufiane Kayal’".

Additionally,
Spiegel reports that two
men were arrested in Giessen and Dusseldorf by German police in
connection with the Brussels attacks.

It’s
also emerged that police
questioned Abdeslam for only two hours after his arrest.
Trump would not be happy.

Meanwhile, French
police arrested a man they say was in the “advanced stages” of
launching an attack.
The French national, identified as Reda Kriket, was convicted in
absentia in Brussels last summer of colluding with terrorists and
planning to wage jihad in Syria. Also found guilty in that trial:
Abdelhamid Abaaoud. Explosives and heavy weapons were found at
Kriket’s Argenteuil residence.

“Mr.
Kriket was convicted last July in Belgium along with more than 30
other members of a network of Islamist radicals for terrorist
crimes,” WSJ
notes.
“The network had operated for several years before authorities
tried to shut it down, and many of its members were already in Syria
when they were convicted, plotting attacks against targets back
home.”

Kriket
was also tied to the Belgian recruiter known as "Father
Christmas."

(Father
Christmas)

Hilariously,
authorities are still hanging on to the notion that all of this isn’t
inextricably intertwined. The Bakraouis as well as Laachraoui are
being treated as belonging to a second cell that’s separate and
distinct from Abaaoud’s cell despite voluminous evidence that
suggests making distinctions here is largely meaningless and almost
certainly counterproductive. “In May, a Brussels court is
expected to deliver a verdict on a second group of alleged jihadists,
which includes Najim Laachraoui, identified by U.S. and European
officials as the second bomber killed in the suicide attack on the
Brussels airport," WSJ continues. "There's no
tangible evidence"
linking the Paris arrest to the Brussels cell, French Interior
Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.

Anyway,
more information is expected either today or over the weekend on the
arrests made by Belgian anti-terror police on Thursday and Friday,
although we're resonably sure it will make no difference whatsoever
in averting future attacks. What it will do however, is
enshrine extra-legal search and seizure into European authorities'
standard operating procedure.

"The
tactic of detaining people first and asking questions later will
likely become increasingly common,"
CNN national security analyst Juliette Kayyem said last night. "There
will be lots more of them. They are going to be what's called
over-broad. They are going to just try to find people or evidence
that may stop the next terrorism attack, and they will figure out who
they have under custody."

Now that's a
policy the rising tide of right-wing nationalist politicians can get
behind